downloading right now. it is steam exclusive and since the game will require steam to be played i doubt that this will change (correct me if i am wrong)

The ETW forums have been hilariously busy recently with people desperately wanting to play the demo.  Stardock forums are much more civilized.  Unless that new beta isn't available in the next few hours...

We downloaded it here at work and none of us have got it running fast enough to be playable (we have pretty good machines). Any ideas?

Ummm....shouldnt you be working??? lol

It's called research   

I only did the tutorials on a 8800gtx and an old core2duo.. 1600x1200, pretty much all settings maxed (4x AA), and windowed mode.

It ran just fine. It has horrid loading times, though, especially when you change video options.

Anyway, I loved the naval combat, but I wonder why you would ever want to use scatter shot or chain shot (the "kill crew" and "kill sails") when the standard ball shot seems to do the job faster

Yeah, if there's ship capturing that would make sense

Yeah, I only played through the tutorial, which was "blow crap up" Gonna give the two battles a whirl later tonight.

Nevermind

Works just fine on my system. My biggest hope however is that the long (1 minute or so) loading screens dont occur before EVERY battle during a campaign. That could easily kill it.

Another thing I've noticed, although I'm not sure if its intentional (demo time limit) or a bug, but so far it has crashed to desktop twice.

Yeah, the loading times are atrocious.

I'm sure it's the old grandma to suck eggs cliche but have you checked for different vid card drivers Blair?  Otherwise look for a quick release from your vid card manaufacture as they realise a massive game just made their cards look rubish.